Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Words without thoughts never to heaven go

I don’t very often get involved with ‘causes’. It’s not that I don’t believe that some things are sufficiently important that they deserve special attention, I think it’s more that my enthusiasm tends to get in the way if I’m not careful and obscures the ultimate goals I’m seeking to achieve.

It first became obvious in my undergraduate years in University when I took it upon myself to raise the membership of the chess club to which I belonged. There were only about ten of us in the club, but it became so stratified that the really expert players stopped attending our Wednesday night games because the rest of us were so easily beaten. And as the numbers dwindled, so did our Wednesday night meetings. Eventually, only three of us could be counted on to attend.

It was in those awkward days before the Internet, and so I decided that the three of us should make some posters advertising the club and tape them up across campus. I was taking some courses in psychology at the time, and I thought we could take advantage subtle behavioural manipulators like colour and shape to attract interest. I decided we should use a deep-purple paper because it is usually associated with royalty, and a really large, flesh coloured pawn to show that even the least of us were important -I thought that featuring a bishop or a knight would just confuse people who weren’t acquainted with the game. And over the pawn, written diagonally in huge dripping blood-red letters, the word ‘CHESS’. To me at least, the symbolism was obvious and jarring: chess was a way to become powerful and exact revenge, even if in real life, you were actually a milquetoast. And, at the very bottom of the poster in tiny but bright yellow lettering, I added neatly printed instructions as to when and where we held our meetings. We put the posters up all over the campus -especially in the cafeterias where the freshies seemed to congregate.

I was really proud of my effort: it was both succinct and visually commanding. All three of us met the following Wednesday, each bringing our own chess sets from home to meet the expected demand.

I suppose it was a bit of a success –three new people showed up, although one of them said she’d just been walking by and wondered why all the lights were on in the usually dimly-lit lounge. A six-person club was an improvement, I guess, but I still couldn’t understand why the posters hadn’t commanded more interest. A few weeks later, one of my non-chess playing friends happened to mention seeing the posters, and I asked her what she thought of them.

I remember she hesitated before answering. “Well…” she started, obviously choosing her words carefully. “It attracted my attention, but…” A worried look crept over her face.

“But…?” I tried not to look hurt, but I’ve never been very good at disguising my emotions.

She attempted a little embarrassed smile, but I could see that she was sorry she’d brought up the subject. “Well… I thought that the way the word ‘chess’ was written suggested…” Another hesitation. “Uhmm… violence.”

I softened my expression, and then tried to smile as if I wasn’t offended.

“And that flesh-coloured thing -Judy told me it was a pawn, or whatever- but it looked more like a…” She suddenly glanced at something on the wall behind me, hoping I wouldn’t notice she was blushing.

“You’re saying I didn’t make my point?” I chuckled at how she’d read it.

She finally rested her eyes gently on my cheek, and reached across the table for my hand. “Well, it didn’t make me want to join, or anything…”

It made me realize that merely attracting attention was not sufficient. Nor was the assumption that creating an emotional response would necessarily entice people who were otherwise busy with their own lives.

A while ago, I remember listening to an audio podcast on the CBC Ideas program hosted by Paul Kennedy, that featured the well-credentialed environmentalist Graham Saul. His thesis was that despite the gloom of an impending global climatic catastrophe, there seemed to be little decisive action being taken to prevent it. He wondered whether or not the problem was one of messaging: that, unlike other successful movements, there seemed to be no single coherent message around which people or the media could rally. With the women’s movement, for example, equality is perhaps the dominant theme -a word that expresses the hopes and expectations of half of the world’s population. It’s much like freedom as the rallying cry for the abolitionist movement, or independence for the many anti-colonialists factions.

As he said, words matter. ‘Great social movements use powerful words to sum up their ultimate goals— words like freedom, equality, liberty, and independence. People participating in those movements take many paths and approach the issue from many directions, but these words, and the ideas that they represent, are like north stars leading society out of the ethical fog and guiding people in a common and righteous direction.’

He interviewed 116 leaders in their fields who were either directly or indirectly involved in the environmental movement. When he ‘asked interviewees to sum up the ultimate goal of past social movements there was overwhelming consensus on the words as well as agreement that words played a very important role in helping the public understand what those movements were fighting for.’ But, ‘ When [he] asked interviewees to sum up what environmentalists are fighting for, the answers were far more diverse and people were generally unsatisfied with their answers. Most did not think that their own choice of words would clearly convey, for the general public, the goal of the modern environmental movement… There was no one word or expression—like equality—that clearly dominated the answers. The three most frequently mentioned concepts were survival (22% of respondents), sustainability (14%), and justice (9%)’ All the words are undoubtedly important, of course, and yet somehow -like my long-ago poster- failed to encapsulate the overall need, the universal importance -in short, they failed to resonate.

As the author of the article wrote, ‘Climate change has an inherent image problem. While you can clearly visualise plastic pollution or deforestation, climate change has a less obvious mugshot: the gases that cause global warming, such as carbon dioxide and methane, are colourless, while impacts are slow-paced and not always visually striking.’ And traditional climate images just aren’t that compelling -even skinny, lonely-looking polar bears on shrinking icebergs.

So ‘psychologist Adam Corner, director of Climate Visuals, a project that aims to revitalise climate imagery’ commissioned an online survey, as well as convening panels in London and Berlin. The conclusion was that ‘people were more likely to empathise with images that showed real faces – such as workers installing solar panels, emergency respondents helping victims of a typhoon or farmers building more efficient irrigation systems to combat drought. It also helped when photographs depicted settings that were local or familiar to the viewer, and when they showed emotionally powerful impacts of climate change.’

Interestingly, the chess club didn’t ask me to do any additional advertising for them. As a matter of fact, the three new members convinced us that we didn’t really need more than six in the club -and would we please take down the posters?